LONGMONT -- At first, it sounds like a sixth-grade geography assignment: draw where the St. Vrain River goes.

Trouble is, that's not so clear anymore.

When the St. Vrain flooded in mid-September, it not only devastated communities, it redrew its own lines. West of town. East of town. Even at spots inside Longmont. It even brought out the eraser from time to time, not just drawing a new course but wiping out the old one.

"Behind Harvest Junction, the old channel actually filled in," said Longmont public works director Dale Rademacher, noting the shopping center in southeastern Longmont.

Putting it back won't be so easy. The city estimates that would take $80 million, but that's still a fluid number, so to speak. A lot depends not just on the difficulty of the project, but the will of federal authorities, including the Army Corps of Engineers and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

FEMA already has said it will look at the river section by section when deciding which restoration plans should get funding. The Corps, meanwhile, is in talks with Longmont to decide which pieces of the river truly need to be restored. Rivers do move, after all.

"If we think we can get the river back into its channel with a reasonable amount of effort, and the Corps says it makes sense, we'll do that," Rademacher said. "If the Corps says 'Sorry, folks, that looks like a reasonably safe channel,' we'll start planning around that, too."

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Where'd you go?

So where is Longmont's signature river these days? Well, it depends on where you ask.

Between Lyons and Longmont, for example, the river now branches not long after it passes Colo. Highway 7. The north branch follows its old course south of Colo. Highway 66, roughly paralleling the highway. But the new southern fork cuts straight across the Western Mobile property (an open space area long used in part for gravel mining), making a beeline for the ponds and lakes roughly a mile to the southeast. The new river course then plunges through the ponds rather than going around and between them as it heads for Hygiene Road and eventually the Pella Crossing region.

The diversions and flooding along the whole western stretch -- aided by dam breaches and old gravel pits -- have made this area a priority in Longmont's discussions with the Army Corps of Engineers. Near Lyons, there are pipelines that need to be inspected and put back into service. The new riverway not only cuts off several irrigation ditches, it also puts several neighborhoods further downstream into a new flood plain -- most notably The Greens and Champion Greens near Airport Road and the Village near Golden Ponds.

"Our need and our ability (to restore the river) varies from point to point in the course of the channel," Rademacher said. "West of Longmont, where it's undermining pipelines and threatening neighborhoods, it's pretty important."

A section of the St. Vrain Greenway trail is washed out by the flood Sept. 14 near Sandstone Ranch Park.
(
Matthew Jonas
)

Coming through town

Inside Longmont, an old park and a new were transformed by the St. Vrain's fresh course. At Izaak Walton Park, the river now cuts directly through the fishing pond, making it unusable for the children's fishing day held there every spring. It's hard to stock a pond when you can't control whether the fish stay, after all.

Meanwhile, the not-yet-built Dickens Farm Park near Harvest Junction will have to be redrawn. The river doesn't even enter or leave the park in the same places anymore -- this was where the old channel not only got emptied, but filled in. That's important, since the park was planned to be an area for kayaking and tubing.

Perhaps more importantly, the Dickens rerouting cuts off yet another irrigation connection, the Bonus Ditch. It's still up to discussion, Rademacher said, whether the ditch will be extended to the new river, or whether the river will be brought back to meet the ditch. He'd like the latter, especially since the Dickens region is also where the city had a sewer interceptor line damaged; putting the river back would make it easier to rebuild the line.

By contrast, the river's course east of Weld County Road 1 may be a low priority. It's easily the longest out-of-channel stretch of the St. Vrain -- from County Line Road to where the river crosses Colo. Highway 119, east of Weld County Road 51/2 -- it's also in a lightly populated area that mostly affects the city's open space plans.

"One opinion could be that flooding is a natural occurrence in this area," Rademacher said as he indicated the region. "If there's a new route than what we had tried to establish as wetlands, that may be the new course of the river."

The decisions should be made within the next few weeks, according to the city. Then what's left is figuring out how much the final cost is going to be and how to pay for it all, even if FEMA covers 75 percent of the bill.

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